Deterritorialized cinema, dislocated spaces and disembodied characters in Bogdan Mirică’s Câini (original) (raw)
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New and Old Realities in Romanian and Hungarian Cinema
Ekphrasis 19/1 2018, 2018
In her original attempt for comparative analysis of art cinema in two East European countries: Romania and Hungary, Anna Batori is using space motifs as ways of investigation and criteria of questioning both the aesthetics and the message of the selected films. The scenographic space with its vertical and horizontal axes becomes a visual vocabulary of analysis, decoding the social-political and cultural implications. The paradox of the gloomy atmosphere in the films of Eastern European corpus and the bright, communicative citizens of this area prompted the author to the logical conclusion that the films are influenced by the political, social and cultural traces of the socialist past as well as by the disappointments of the capitalist transformation. The research, mainly based on her PhD thesis, is also drawing from her first-hand experience of the capitalist transformation; the book has 11 chapters, 5 dedicated to the Romanian cinema and 3 to the Hungarian cinema.
Making Sense of the New Romanian Cinema: Three Perspectives
The article provides a critical look at some of the recent academic literature (in English) on the New Romanian Cinema (NRC). It mainly engages with three texts: a book-length appreciative introduction (by Monica Filimon) to the work of writer-director Cristi Puiu: a highly ambitious attempt (by László Strausz) to trace, within Romanian culture, the tradition that the NRC could be said to belong to; and a harsh ideological critique of the NRC (by Bogdan Popa).
The representation of other arts in cinema can be regarded as a different semiotic system revealing what is hidden in the narrative, as a site of cultural meanings inherent to the cinematic apparatus addressing a pensive spectator, or a discourse on cinema born in the space of intermediality. In the post-1989 films of Romanian director Lucian Pintilie, painterly and sculptural references, as well as miniatures become figurations of cultural identity inside allegories about a society torn between East and West. I argue that art references are liberating these films from provincialism by transforming them into a discourse lamenting over the loss of Western, Christian and local values, endangered or forgotten in the postcommunist era. In the the films under analysis ̶ An Unforgettable Summer (1994), Too Late (1996) and Tertium non datur (2006) ̶ images reminding of Byzantine iconography, together with direct references and remediations of sculptures by Romanian-born Constantin Brâncuși, participate in historico-political allegories as expressions of social crisis and the transient nature of values. They also reveal the tension between an external and internal image of Romania, the aspiration of the “other Europe” to connect with the European cultural tradition, in a complex demonstration of a “self othering” process. I will also argue that, contrary to the existing criticism, this generalizing, allegorical tendency can be also detected in some of the films of the generation of filmmakers representing the New Romanian Cinema, for example in Radu Jude's Aferim! (2014).
The Point of No Return: From Great Expectations to Great Desperation in New Romanian Cinema
East, West and Centre Reframing post-1989 European Cinema 2017-02 | Book chapter, 2017
The NCR (New Romanian Cinema) depicts many stories revealing some of the somber results of the exodus of a population coming from a ‘marginal space’ of Europe, a nation that woke up from the communist nightmare confused about its identity, living a permanent ‘frontier situation’ and ‘still in the search of the way ahead’ (Boia 2001: 12–13, 27). Twenty-five years after the fall of communism, Romanian villages are depopulated. The locals, once not even allowed to hold a passport, are now leaving the country at an alarming and increasing rate. The often tragic results of this exodus are nevertheless profound, with dramatic long-term consequences. Thousands of children are left without proper supervision or education. The family, once at the center of a patriarchal society, has been destroyed in the desperate rush of parents towards the West. A good number of their children will later become criminals, closing a vicious circle. This is the dramatic resort of NCR film productions such as Eu când vreau să fluier, fluier/When I want to whistle, I whistle (Florin Șerban, 2010, Romania/Sweden/Germany) and the philosophy behindPeriferic/Outbound (Bogdan George Apetri, 2011, Romania), the film that closes stylistically the first decade of New Romanian Cinema. This book chapter, authored by dr. Lucian Georgescu, is part of the East, West and Centre EUP volume - where the world’s leading scholars in the field assemble to consider the ways in which notions such as East and West, national and transnational, central and marginal are being rethought and reframed in contemporary European cinema. Assessing the state of post-1989 European cinema, from (co)production and reception trends to filmic depictions of migration patterns, economic transformations and socio-political debates over the past and the present, they address increasingly intertwined cinema industries that are both central (France, Germany) and marginal (Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania) in Europe. This is a ground-breaking and essential read, not just for students and scholars in Film and Media Studies, but also for those interested in wider European Studies as well.
Fabricating Remembrance: Romanian Cinema and the Problem of National Identity
MA Thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2013
The scope of this thesis is to explore the role of the visual media, and cinema in particular, in the shaping of national identity in the multicultural, highly volatile area of Eastern Europe in the 20th century. Starting from Benedict Anderson’s theory that linguistic identity predates the development of the nation-state in ecclesiastic Latin-dominated Western Europe, I claim that cinema acted as a tool in demarcating the boundaries between the “national self” and the “Other” in what used to be a historically homogenous cultural space that came to a close with the collapse of the multinational empires that administered the region until WWI. Suggesting that its necessity to cope with instability helped it develop a protean identity, I use Romania for showcasing the area’s ability to face up to its not altogether acknowledged past.
2017
Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of Eastern European Cinema represents the materialization of a moment that started in 2014 with the 12th conference of the European Society for the Study of English/ESSE, which took place in Slovakia. As the editor, Andrea Virginás, participated in a panel named “The use of Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of Eastern European Cinema”, she was suggested the idea of a possible volume on that topic. Hence, the book under review is a collection of 12 case studies of post-1989 national cinemas such as Croatian, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian and Romanian. The Eastern European film and cinema are generally subsumed within a postcolonial reading of the New Wave Cinema. Using this postcolonial framework the authors rethink national cinematic canon and present the various aspects of the ”spatial”, the ”bodily” and the ”memory turn” as represented on screen. The articles work on a double concern; on the one hand, they follow t...